How far is too far to drive to a recycling centre?
Where we live the council collects recycling, however the quantity you can recycle each fortnight is sadly limited. When I get big cardboard boxes I keep them in the garage until I have. a pretty sizeable pile which I can take to recycle. However, the household recycling centre is a 30 minute round trip in a car (sadly not electric!)
My concern is that the net impact of this trip might be negative! Is there any rule-of-thumb I could apply to determine the benefit of recycling versus the impact of driving?
(I do of course try not to make a dedicated trip for this purpose, combining with other nearby activities)
My answer was as follows
A 30 minute drive would be approximately 15 miles, an average small car produces 200 grams of CO2 per mile, so you are emitting about 3 Kg of CO2.
The CO2 footprint of new plastic manufacture is about 6 Kg CO2 per 1 Kg of plastic.
For recycled plastic manufacture its about 3.5 Kg CO2 per Kg of plastic. So the nett difference is 2.5 Kg CO2.
Supposing that world needs plastic its going to churn it out whether or not you go to the recycling centre, but your decision to go will save 2.5Kg of CO2 for each Kg of plastic you take.
Thus, to cancel out your petrol car's CO2 emissions from driving as long as you are recycling more than 1.2 Kg of plastic per trip to the recycling centre then there is a net reduction in the amount of CO2 potentially emitted in the future manufacture of plastic.
However, after further consideration perhaps considering the financial cost is more appropriate than merely looking at CO2 emissions.
You have to pay for the petrol but the money might be better spent on buying products with card packaging instead plastic packaging, or just offsetting the CO2 and putting it in the general trash. Also the cost of producing virgin plastic is about six times the cost of recycled plastic (£1,200 per tonne versus £200). Is it worth spending £2 of petrol to save £1 worth of plastic and £0.10 of CO2? Maybe.
I've had more of a think about it and whilst the matter is somewhat closed over on StackExchange, I feel I need to continue, so here goes...
Fifteen miles of travel in my Peugeot 208 consumes about £2.10 of petrol, or 1.68 litres of petrol and emits about 2.25 Kg of CO2.
East Hertfordshire Council have fortnightly refuse collections for recyclable waste, and receive an income of £1.86 million from the sale of recycles materials and credits for diverting stuff from landfill. With East Herts' population of 147,080 this averages out to an income of £12.65 per person per year.
However, the cost of refuse collection and recycling in East Herts is £3.8million, or £25.84 per person. I guess they'd be doing the collection anyway even if they weren't recycling, it might be cheaper not to recycle, but they'd still need the lorries and the staff.
If the recycled material was all plastic, then at £200 per tonne, we could estimate that 9,300 tons of plastic is recycled / sold on. Which is equivalent to 63.2Kg per person or for 100% paper 840 Kg.
I'm not sure what a car load of plastic is. For stuff like hard core or manure, then I'd estimate that I could put between half a ton and a ton in my little car, but plastic, I dunno. If I were loading up a car by hand, then maybe 100Kg feels right, that 63.2Kg is about half a car load of plastic.
But, here is where I mis-read the original question, OP wasn't asking about plastic. They had in mind mostly cardboard, and I just went off on one. I hereby revise my earlier calculations...
So, the first source I found on google gives a price for cardboard of $100 per ton, the second source gives around £40 per ton for cardboard, but for mixed papers its down to £15 per ton.
Now to find the CO2 footprint of cardboard, I've found a great report called The Climate Benefits of Material Recycling which actually has more authoritative figures for both car and plastic.
Virgin plastic emits on average 2.1 Kg CO2e per Kg
Recycled plastic emits 1.3 Kg CO2e per Kg
Virgin paper/card 1.1 Kg CO2e per Kg
Recycled paper/card 0.7 Kg CO2e per Kg
So with this information, if I were shipping only plastic to the recycling centre, the break even quantity would be 2.8 Kg. If I were shipping only paper the break even quantity would be 5.6 Kg
Now to plug costs in there.
2.8 Kg of recyclable plastic is about £0.56
5.6 Kg of recyclable mixed paper is about £0.01
OP and myself don't explicitly get paid for freely giving our recyclable materials to the local recycling centre, its possible that our local taxes are slightly cheaper because the the income stream to the local authority, we might be generous and pretend that it does so that money comes back to us in a round about sort of way.
So in order for the trip to the recycling centre to pay for its own fuel, the break even quantity would be 10.5 Kg of plastic or 180 Kg of mixed paper.
Back on Sustainability Stack Exchange a chap called Chris H points out...
converting to money is handy but given the large effective subsidies for fossil fuels it can significantly distort the calculation
I broadly agree, but its not clear how this should feature in the calculations. If petrol is underpriced because of fossil fuel subsidies, we could double the petrol cost, so all the break evens double. We'd need to transport 21 Kg of plastic or 360 Kg of mixed paper in order to justify the journey. in this respect fossil fuel subsidies help to incentivise recycling, making it easier and cheaper to do.
If fuel were completely free and there was no financial incentive for recycling then the break even quantities are just a few Kg. As fuel costs become greater and we pretend there is a financial incentive to recycling, then there is less incentive.
In East Hertfordshire, where in a roundabout sort of way we receive £12.65 each year from recycling, this currently pays for the fuel for about six trips to the recycling centre. In each trip we would drop off either 10 Kg of plastic or 140 Kg of mixed paper and card, or some mixture of the two.
This article in The Guardian states that the UK government subsidises fossil fuels to the tune of £10.8 billion per year, which I guess is funded by about £150 per person per year. These subsidies are mostly in the lower VAT rate on domestic electricity ad heating gas. But if you categorised the freeze on the fuel duty escalator as a subsidy, then the figures are £16.2 billion per year, or £231 per person.
The UK consumes around 35,000,000 tonnes of petrol and diesel a year, which is 47,475,651,773 litres. If the entire subsidy was on transport fuel, it would be £0.34 per litre
My annual petrol bill is about £1,500 for about 11,000 miles, if about 65% of the price of fuel is tax and duties, around £0.75 pr litre, then I'm handing the government £975 per year. If the subsidies ceased to exist, and fuel duty was lowered by the same amount, and then the cost of the fuel from the oil companies rose to compensate, I'm not sure I'd notice.
If the government subsidising the fossil fuels by a greater amount than what I was paying, then maybe I'd notice. But those subsidies aren't halving the price. The best they could possibly doing it making fuel 15% cheaper, but since I'm paying far more than that as tax, its all pointless.
Right, six trips to the recycling centre make up 90 miles, which is 0.8% of my annual motor distance. If the fossil fuel subsidies were entirely in transport fuel (which they aren't), then the 0.8% is subsidised to the tune of £1.89. This is about a seventh of the fuel cost.
But due to the way the subsidy is calculated, its all a brain teaser.
The subsidy isn't money given to the fuel companies, it is the government having a fuel duty escalator a decade ago, and then deciding not to raise fuel duty. It's completely independent of the fossil fuel companies, and purely about the government deciding tax levels.
So the distortion caused by the subsidy is this petrol would cost about £1.60 per litre instead of the current level of £1.249
So we can now increase or decrease the break even quantities to see how we feel, that's around 13 Kg of plastic or around 210 Kg of paper, per trip.
This article in The Guardian states that the UK government subsidises fossil fuels to the tune of £10.8 billion per year, which I guess is funded by about £150 per person per year. These subsidies are mostly in the lower VAT rate on domestic electricity ad heating gas. But if you categorised the freeze on the fuel duty escalator as a subsidy, then the figures are £16.2 billion per year, or £231 per person.
The UK consumes around 35,000,000 tonnes of petrol and diesel a year, which is 47,475,651,773 litres. If the entire subsidy was on transport fuel, it would be £0.34 per litre
My annual petrol bill is about £1,500 for about 11,000 miles, if about 65% of the price of fuel is tax and duties, around £0.75 pr litre, then I'm handing the government £975 per year. If the subsidies ceased to exist, and fuel duty was lowered by the same amount, and then the cost of the fuel from the oil companies rose to compensate, I'm not sure I'd notice.
If the government subsidising the fossil fuels by a greater amount than what I was paying, then maybe I'd notice. But those subsidies aren't halving the price. The best they could possibly doing it making fuel 15% cheaper, but since I'm paying far more than that as tax, its all pointless.
Right, six trips to the recycling centre make up 90 miles, which is 0.8% of my annual motor distance. If the fossil fuel subsidies were entirely in transport fuel (which they aren't), then the 0.8% is subsidised to the tune of £1.89. This is about a seventh of the fuel cost.
But due to the way the subsidy is calculated, its all a brain teaser.
The subsidy isn't money given to the fuel companies, it is the government having a fuel duty escalator a decade ago, and then deciding not to raise fuel duty. It's completely independent of the fossil fuel companies, and purely about the government deciding tax levels.
So the distortion caused by the subsidy is this petrol would cost about £1.60 per litre instead of the current level of £1.249
So we can now increase or decrease the break even quantities to see how we feel, that's around 13 Kg of plastic or around 210 Kg of paper, per trip.
